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WEEDINATOR Exhibited at Farm Hack Wales 2018

A project log for WEEDINATOR 2019

The WEEDINATOR project continues .... The inevitability of robots working on farms draws ever nearer ....

capt-flatus-oflahertyCapt. Flatus O'Flaherty ☠ 10/08/2018 at 07:560 Comments

Demonstrating the machine to a group of actual vegetable growers was interesting and the main questions seemed to revolve around scale - how big should these robots be? After a quick poll by a raising of hands, about 50% thought it was ok as it was and the other 50% thought it should be significantly smaller. The overall reception seemed to be positive and questions about 'robots stealing our jobs' did not really feature too much. The analogy of the domestic washing machine was quite useful - a simple 'robot' that we now take for granted and never really think about any more.

I also managed to demonstrate the Nvidia Jetson TX2 recognising people coming in through the door and draw bounding boxes around them: 

I had only previously got this feature working the day before the event and even then, it was not working properly. Fortunately, whilst setting up, I noticed a tiny plastic tab need the camera lens and it turned out that it had a rather opaque lens cap over the camera lens! After taking it off, it performed very much better and the system proved to be quite impressive.

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